Tag Archive: relationships

This book is bylined as ‘Adventures in love and sex’ and while it is that, it is so much more. It really is adventures in you; adventures and voyages.

Ms Black is a sex columnist who finally, thank everything you believe in, decided to write a book.
“A sex columnist?” I hear you say, shocked and slightly titillated (if you were honest).
“We don’t really need another book about all that!”

Oh yes we do. And this is the book we need. This is the book every single woman needs, and probably quite a few men too. It’s the big sister we never had, even if we had a big sister. It’s the friend we can trust who knows more than we do but never makes us feel stupid. It’s the slightly crazy aunt we adore because she makes it okay to say stuff and ask questions, and she tells us the truth.

Because this book is not just about sex and what to do, how to do it and where to find people to do it with. It’s about finding out who you are, what you really truly want and need, and then being empowered enough to go ask for it.

It is chocful of information and opinion as well as experience. Ms Black is not some expert tut tutting at you for not knowing stuff, but rather your mate sitting around a dinner table admitting what she didn’t know and telling you how she gained the knowledge. She shows you the way, she doesn’t drag you down the path.

One of the many things I took from this book is the idea that we should stop speaking of our sex lives as though they are separate from our actual lives. As Ms Black says, it’s your life and how you choose to express yourself sexually. They are not separate things, one of which is active at a time. If one aspect of our lives is not healthy, you can be sure all aspects will be affected.

Ms Black takes women’s sexuality out of the basement cupboard of shame and has created a space where women, and men, can learn, grow and develop as rounded, satisfied sexual being. She simply and succinctly reminds us that we are going to be sexual creatures, and be sexually active – we may as well do it the right way for each of us. It’s too fundamental an aspect of life to screw up really.

The line ‘We do the best we can with what we have’ is used in this book more than once. There is no judgement is what anyone chooses to do, but what Ms Black is doing here is making sure that we all have more, know more, believe more, so that we can better make decisions about what we do.

And that has to be a good thing for the whole world.

The only problem I have with this book is that I didn’t have it as a 20 year old when I set off into the sexual wonderland. I made so many crappy decisions and did so many stupid things because I just didn’t know. Every single responsible loving mother who can admit their daughter will be a sexual being one day should get this book for her. In fact, every woman should read this book and then pass it on to the men they love, be they brothers, lovers, or friends.

If a relationship is about more than sex, surely cheating cannot simply be about what you do with your dangley bits. In the days of yore, when everyone pretended that a ‘normal’ family was a mom, a dad, kids and a pet, sex on Wednesdays and scones on Sundays perhaps cheating was more easily defined. People were not friends with members of the opposite (or should that be adjacent?) sex except as couples, relationships were more strictly defined and sex was primarily a conjugal right. Now, post sexual revolution, relationships come in so many shapes and forms there can be no absolutes regarding any aspect of them.

If sexual contact is cheating, then swingers must feel betrayed all the time. Only they don’t. As long as the sex takes place with the knowledge of the partner and usually in full view of the partner, swingers don’t feel betrayed by their partners having sex with other people.

So maybe it’s only cheating if your partner doesn’t know. “Anything behind my back. Anything that would require lying to get it done without my knowing”But people in open relationships don’t seem to think that. They are perfectly aware that their partner may, at some stage, have sex with someone else. They will probably never know when, or even if this happens. But if and when it does, it certainly would not be considered cheating by either partner.

So maybe cheating is about sharing yourself with someone else. Dividing your energies.

“For me cheating is when you give away the love that should be given to your partner.”Men and women are friends with people outside of their relationships, many guys and chicks have very real, very intimate sharing friendships with each other with the full knowledge of their partners. So sharing intimate details and thoughts, dreams and all that other deep and relevant stuff can’t always be cheating either.

What one couple may consider cheating may be perfectly normal behaviour to another couple. In other words, every behaviour you consider strange is someone else’s fetish or way of life. Somewhere there is a man who likes the fact that his wife sneaks off and shags strangers on the ‘sly’ in dingy hotels. Only she knows he knows and he knows she knows etc. And it’s what they do. Most of us would immediately classify that behaviour as cheating only for that couple it’s not.

In some societies sexual infidelity is both accepted and expected. In the Masai tribe, young women marry older men, men in their forties who have proved themselves to be men. The women are generally in their twenties and have lovers the same age as them. All children born to the woman are accepted as her husbands, by everyone including the husband. This is the case even if the child is obviously not the husbands. The wife’s young lovers live in the compound with the married couple. All that is required is that the wife be sexually available to her husband at his demand. When he was a twenty something youth, not yet socially a man and able to marry, the husband had a lover who was married to some old guy too. And probably has kids running about he is not responsible for.

But let a Masai husband catch his wife in bed with one of her lovers!!! He is fully permitted to beat her to death for disrespecting him.

In some parts of southern Europe , the mistress is as much a part of married reality as family lunch on Sundays. Italian men are renown for having both a wife and permanent mistress and in France , when it was revealed that Mitterrand had a long standing mistress and an illegitimate daughter, the headline of Le Figaro, Paris ‘ oldest daily newspaper, was “SO????”

If you grow up in a society where having sex with more than one person at one stage in your life is ordinary and acceptable, the line for what cheating is has to be somewhere else in the sand.

For me, cheating is more than shagging someone else. It’s much more about where he spends his emotional energy. If it’s on someone other than me at the expense of our relationship, that’s cheating.

While I would hate to have to choose, I’d rather my partner shag some stranger in another town and never see her again, than go out for long lunches and cosy dinners with a “friend”, sending smses on the sneak, thinking about her when with me, discussing our relationship, his hopes, dreams and all that pink fluffy stuff with some woman for six months without ever touching her. That for me would be more of a betrayal.

People consist of four areas; emotional, intellectual, spiritual and sexual. If my partner is going to share one of those aspects of himself with someone other than me, I reckon sexual in the one I’d least mind losing. Not to say I wouldn’t cut his dick off and feed it to the squirrels, but in theory I’d rather I were his sole confidante, the only person he trusted with who and what he really is, deep inside where the important stuff resides, than that he shared that with other people and let me have sole command of his penis.